Digital Lab Notebook
Contents:
What is it? 
How does it work?
More Information
What is it?
The digital lab notebook has always been a core project at CHI. Its development is key to the successful implementation of many of the guiding principles of CHI’s technologies.
Drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, ca. 1510-1515. Left: Reflection of light in spherical concave mirror.
Right: Paths of light rays in parabolic mirror.
The digital lab notebook serves the same function as a written scientist’s lab notebook before the digital age. This notebook was an integral element of their published results. A “digital lab notebook” associated with a digital representation provides transparency, enabling people to assess its reliability and have confidence they can rely on it for their own research purposes. CHI’s current methodologies, capture, and processing tools are designed to collect all of the information necessary for a scientific lab notebook.
How Does It Work?
The digital lab notebook records how a digital representation is made. The notebook describes the means and circumstances of digital information capture from a “real world” subject and tracks all the events that happen during the processing of this information into a completed digital representation. The digital representation carries the notebook’s information along with it. That way anyone can evaluate the quality of the digital representation by looking in the notebook. New software under development is making the information in the notebook easier to access and search.
More Information
Interested in learning more about the digital lab notebook and its development? Below are links into a more in-depth paper describing the concept, vision, and advantages of this model. Use the links in this Table of Contents to read the subtopics, or you can read them sequentially on the page More About the Digital Lab Notebook.
